The article details Wallace’s lifelong struggle with depression and in particular his terrible last year, when he tried to go off the antidepressant Nardil, which he had taken for nearly two decades. (He eventually had electroshock therapy.) It makes for profoundly sad, and sometimes uncomfortably intimate, reading. Wallace on his famous bandana: “It makes me feel kind of creepy that people view it as a trademark or something — it’s more a recognition of a weakness, which is that I’m just kind of worried that my head’s going to explode.” Most poignantly ironic detail: Wallace’s mother, a teacher, once wrote a textbook called “Practically Painless English.” Eerily fitting for a writer who once said he wanted to write “stuff about what it feels like to live, instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.”